


Turned black by smoke

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:22:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day at the beach for Annie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turned black by smoke

Before she left, Kat gave Annie an umbrella: a hulking, black, obstinate thing, full of spars and strange sinews, which was always on the verge of springing open in her hand. She asked Kat at the time if it was supposed to double as a weapon, but Kat said, no, she was saving that for Christmas. Which since the Donlans usually travelled for the holidays meant that the Court’s postal service was going to be in for something of a shock, probably, but Annie found she didn’t mind the idea—the people who cut holes in students’ packages, looking into hers and seeing an edge.

The umbrella, Kat said, is in case it rains fish. Kat was not an advocate of field trips with Coyote.

When Annie stepped out of Jones’ car, it was only drizzling, the sky as silvery and barred as pale moire. Zimmy would have complained; she could imagine the other girl jumping and hissing in the shower, the gunk in her eyes diluted but not purged by the falling droplets, streaks of gray drawn down across her coarse-skinned cheeks. Not far from where Jones was parked, the beach began, and without waiting for her former teacher Annie walked towards it, stopping only when she reached the path that divided sand from asphalt. She took off her shoes and left them stacked under a bench. Jones arrived a few moments behind her, in the blur of shaping motion that Annie had rarely seen, except when the lady went a round with Eglamore. It was hard to tell why Jones had thought it necessary for something as small as catching up with Annie before she reached the sand. Then again, Annie didn’t usually run ahead, at least with this keeper. The dull sky and leaden sea tugged at her like depth.

"Do you see Coyote?" she asked Jones, who had slowed back down to ordinary proportions. "The beach seems…"

"Abandoned," said Jones, shading her eyes, as though there was a sun to ward away. Her head, to Annie’s surprise, bore signs of dampening. "Your blinker stone?"

Annie pulled it out of her shirtfront and weighed it in one hand. The fire that sprung up was an ersatz shade of orange, and it cast few shadows on the stark grey landscape. As she released her grip, a little, its curl grew more organic, holes opening briefly between too-perfect tongues: like the puzzle-piece outline of cranial bones, that surprising inward evidence of vision. It painted her clavicle heatlessly gold and daubed her chin in yellow. Jones was watching the ocean, and Annie, with an unfamiliar tinge of resentment, wished she could coax her face sideways, with a word or a— But just because Jones was a creature of unbreakable rock didn’t mean you could touch her, turn her, warm her as any rock would by daylight be warmed. Annie had been cautioned against treating her friends and guides as pets. Aha, she thought, but if Jones was _my_ pet rock... I’d draw a mustache on her in pen, and everything would be fine.

Anyway. That had been Eglamore’s warning, and Eglamore and Jones—the point was, it hadn’t really helped to come back from Ysengrin’s attack and have Jones answer her questions. On the one hand, a warning; on the other, a plea. That was how she had understood it, anyway. Jones removing her jacket; Jones crushing a polished black stone. She knew she wasn’t right, but that in itself seemed unmeaningful, like a smudge of soot on the dungeon wall. Jones’ wrist under her hand hadn’t been rigid, but neither had Annie put enough pressure on to see if the skin could give.

"Take it off," Jones suggested, and Annie drew the pendant over her head, to hold it from her, dangling, at arm’s length. The fire from her mind stretched downwards as though actually affected by gravity: an inverted tear. "Should I make a sky symbol," Annie said, but Jones was shaking her head.

"We’re outside Court territory. And Gillitie, for that matter. This is best kept private."

Annie, belatedly, unfolded the umbrella. It was so large you could probably have used it to roof a smokehouse, if you wanted. She let the burning blinker stone fall to her side. The chain stretched taut. It felt like she was carrying too many things, awkwardly balanced in her hands and the crook of her arm, but after a moment the sensation faded, and she was left with only the cold weight of the umbrella’s handle against her neck and shoulder.

She wondered whether Kat had designed the gift herself. It didn’t evoke the usual style, although Annie was dimly aware that if pressed to describe the idiosyncrasies of Kat’s engineering she would have said something about robot wings, and then, hopefully, quieted. It was graceless. Jones stepped neatly out from under the perimeter almost as soon as its ribs had unfurled. But, nevertheless…

“ _Fire Head Girl,_ " said a voice so deep and sweet it tore. Teeth in a red belly. She saw, too close, the arching back of the killer whale, black and wet as a child's pupil between white lids of sea and sky. Then the flash of scarlet. "I told you to meet me at the ocean!"

Jones’ expression tightened. Annie looked away, at the retreating tide, which piled like grey velvet over itself, and layers of foam for lace. Skirts netted with pale tatting, and the sea pulling its gown up and up, to bare the paler sand. The wet tideline, shining and pocked by stone, crab holes, the mirrored dark spots that were birds overhead. “Grow legs, Coyote!” she said, dousing the blinker stone, and Coyote spouted his laughter. Not a ‘killer whale’, she thought. An orca. His blue-ringed, rolling eye. “Come out, come out,” he sang through his nose, head just a smooth protuberance above the waves, like a floating boulder. “What a lovely day for a lesson! Here, I’ll make you a boat!”

The umbrella leapt from her hands. It landed, squarely, on its tip in the sand, and then unfolded, in a way that made its first opening seem like the dense point at the heart of a spiral. When he stopped—and part of her had not expected him to stop—it was a sharp-nosed canoe, with his own eye polished and gleaming at the stern. Kat wouldn’t be pleased. Coyote performed a somersault and came up sandy: he must have been at a depth of hardly eight, twelve feet, and all the creatures of the shallows scuttling away. The boat was stuck where it lay, but Jones helped her shove it down the slope and into the water. She did not follow Annie over the side.

"I might sink you," she said, at Annie’s look. She handed her the oar.

Annie rowed out to where Coyote was waiting, and then further, following the tide; by the time she reached him, he had become some kind of canid again, albeit a soaked one. He paddled beside her craft, muzzle low in the water, his eyes positioned uncomfortably on the flat top of his skull. “Put your back into it,” he advised, when her arms began to tire. The beach was then only a bone strip at her back, and she was vaguely conscious that she had been cheated: had been promised revelations, and found herself, instead, balanced on the rough surface of an unimaginable sounding, with no way to break through to the dark and the cold. Above her the sky spread wan as sickness, although the rain had gone. At its lowest rim lay the horizon’s downy belt.

She was reminded of her father's satellite, skating past stars.

She had lost her way in all the skin and garb the world put between itself and the hard stone core. Like a plum, built for one cold end round the unlovely kernel—but made so rich, syrupy and whole, that you could devour every continuous curve without laying its purpose bare. Or swallow it. Maybe the bottom of the ocean was in her too: its gloomy, drifting emptiness, the secret vents of heat.

Coyote’s eye turned to her, not in disapproval. “You’re not as good at this as the girl I used to swim for,” he said, through a mouthful of bubbles. “Or fly with. In those days, I was a raven! At least, in the north and west.  _They_ knew about the ocean. The light, the flat plain… not a mystery, but a larder! Oh, the shellfish—” He fell silent for a moment, apparently overwhelmed by a nostalgic appetite. “She didn’t bother with what lurked below. Sensible girl. The ocean was the unchanging face of the world! First child of the sky! And she had more important concerns, anyway.”

She felt the tipping of Kat’s vessel beneath her, like Kat's voice when she worried. Thought of Jones, her weight enough to pin down the far shore.

"What were they?"

"What?" said Coyote.

"The more important concerns. What was it that made the _sea_ seem fixed?"

His mouth, opening: teeth ripping through the little wavetops like seeds. “Why, the forest.”


End file.
